


Escape with Eileen

by grey2510



Series: Convos with Crowley [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 12x21 fix it fic, Crack Treated Seriously, Crowley is a rat, Eileen lives, Gen, Implied Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, LITERALLY, One Shot, Post-Episode: s12e21 There's Something About Mary, Yep I went there, well crack as in i can't believe 12x21 is canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 04:17:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10891527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grey2510/pseuds/grey2510
Summary: How Eileen escapes a pointless death by cold open and how Crowley escapes crappy writing by rat.





	Escape with Eileen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThayerKerbasy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThayerKerbasy/gifts).



> Not to be wanky, but screw 12x21. I'm going rogue.

Watching his body—well, not exactly _his_ body, but it might as well be, at this point—get dragged out of the room by two minions—who will of course be properly tortured when the time comes, the miserable ingrates—is hardly the most dignified moment of Crowley’s long (un)life. He doesn’t even want to think of the damage to his suit.

He even wishes could say that his present, ah, vessel is his least dignified moment. But, alas, even this furry vermin form is better than being Lucifer’s “puppy".

The feathered bastard will pay.

He waits until they deposit his body in a forgotten room, then quickly evaluates his options. If he smokes back into his body, it’ll still be bound to the insufferable prick. No, he needs to rectify that situation first.

But there’s only so much a rat can do.

There’s a reason why Olivette hasn’t made a magical break for it from her hamster cage.

He needs a recruit.

Luckily, he has just the person in mind—someone who might just be inclined to help, especially given recent events.

(And, no, it’s not Dean. Despite what everyone thinks, he _does_ have other...well, not friends...)

(Whatever.)

Granted, she’s been skeptical of him, but he really _is_ on her side. It’s not his fault the rest of demonkind is so crushingly stupid and narrow-minded that it’s impossible to include them in a scheme without them utterly cocking up the whole affair.

So, he’s asked her to pretend to be his captive when others are around.

Honestly, though, he’s been a gentleman and a rather gracious host.

She really should be more appreciative.

It takes an age, it seems, to get to her room, even with going through the spaces between the walls. Finally, though, he emerges in a chamber that has been quite well furnished for what ostensibly is a prisoner’s cell—the chair with arm and leg shackles is more for show than anything, though it does add a certain delicious something to the décor—to find Eileen Leahy relaxing on the bed with a book.

Not wanting to startle the hunter—or have her toss him unceremoniously from the room—he approaches the bed slowly and climbs up on the windowsill in line of sight of the woman, but far enough away to avoid an errant hand-swipe at him.

She doesn’t notice him at first, utterly absorbed in her book (unfortunately, his current vision is too poor to make out the title, but it looks like a ponderous tome and hardly a “beach read"). Sighing as best a rat can, he scurries over to the corner of the sill, grasps the edge of the curtain between his teeth and shakes the fabric around.

“Eugh!” Eileen cries out behind him, scrambling off the bed.

Quickly, he drops the curtain and turns to her, raising himself up on his hind legs and waving his front paws in what he hopes is an emphatic “No!” Her hand is raised to forcefully shoo him away with the book—oh, _why_ couldn’t she be reading one of the copies of _Vogue_ laying about—and he instinctively squeaks, as ineffectual as it may be.

Frantically, he puts his paws to work, signing as best he can, “I’m not a rat!”

(“Crowley" would be impossible to finger-spell.)

The signs are jumbled and probably a linguistic mess (“rat" ends up looking more like “mouse”—turns out crossing one’s digits is far more difficult as a non-primate), but he does the same patterns enough, again and again, so that Eileen pauses, recognizing, if nothing else, that this is not normal rat behaviour.

She lowers the book and peers at him.

"...Crowley?”

He nods repeatedly with relief.

“Did...did they turn you into a rat?” There’s a look of disbelief mixed with amusement on her face, and if he could properly scowl, he would.

He shakes his head in response instead, then points with his tail in the direction of the door. He looks at her as meaningfully as he can with his beady eyes. He points again, then starts to make his way to the door. Reaching it, he pauses and waits expectantly.

Eileen sighs, then follows him. The door is theoretically locked, for appearances’ sake, but a quick prick of her finger with a dagger that she draws from under her jacket and a drop of blood on the lock has them out into the corridor in a jiffy.

Realizing her enviable human legs are better suited for this endeavor, he raises himself up on his hind legs, motioning to her. Suppressing a giggle, and a shudder, she bends over and picks him up. He tries not to dwell on the indignity of it all, nor her less than sympathetic reactions. They need each other at this point, unfortunately him more so, and while Crowley does often delight in the business of making enemies, this is perhaps not the time.

Sitting on his haunches for any great length to sign is exhausting, so he only manages a gross approximation of the word “basement" before settling down in her palms. She nods, then puts him in her jacket pocket. Feeling rather like a kangaroo joey, with just his head and front paws poking out, Crowley gets as comfortable as he can in the folds of durable army-green canvas. His nose twitches, but doesn’t detect any more than the usual residual sulphuric smell of a demons’ lair, and so he assumes they’re in the clear for now.

Swiftly, they—well, Eileen—make their way to the basement room where his body was horribly mishandled and dumped. A dodge of a minion here, a point of Crowley’s tail in the right direction there, and they arrive wholly unscathed.   

“Not looking too good, Crowley,” Eileen muses as she stands over his human body, carefully cupping him in her palm as she draws him out of her pocket and places him on the floor. “Go ahead, smoke into him or whatever.”

He shakes his head, then stands up and gestures with his paws down his front. Then, he puts his two paws together in fists before pulling them down apart from each other.

“Body...broken?” she asks. He nods. “How do we fix it?”

He hates how grateful he is at the pronoun.

But, to work. And now the tricky part. In order to assess the damage, he needs to be able _see_ it. He signs to her again.

“See...magic?” Her brow furrows, and she kneels down next to the body, her nose crinkling slightly (without him inside, it doesn’t have a particularly long shelf life). “So, there’s something magically wrong with your body.”

He nods.

“And you need me so you can somehow see the magic so you know how to fix it?”

Another nod. He likes this girl. Not a dullard at all, unlike some flannel-wearers he knows…

“Right, ok. What do I do?”

Twitching his tail with excitement, Crowley pads over to a broken table covered in dust. Then, painstakingly, he draws out the phonetic syllables of the Enochian that should reveal the coding, so to speak, of the spellwork he used on Lucifer, which has since been twisted and used on him.

Bloody traitorous minions.

Eileen gets up and reads the spell out loud, and Crowley only has to correct her pronunciation once, emphasizing a particular ‘o’ sound that’s difficult for non-native speakers even when they can hear the sounds modeled for them. She frowns when she says it again, flawlessly.

“It didn’t do anything.”

He nods, hoping to let her know that it wasn’t an error on her part. He’d wanted to make sure she said it all correctly before actually doing the spell; Enochian magic is finicky stuff, and he shudders to think what might have happened to his body if even the slightest sound were off. Scurrying back over to his body, he puts a paw on the forehead, which is lamentably streaked with grime, and looks to Eileen, jerking his head between her and the body.

“And I thought my week was already pretty bad…" she sighs, dropping down to a knee again as Crowley moves out of her way.

She puts a hand on his forehead, then repeats the Enochian. As soon as the last “rah" sound passes her lips, his body flares with red sigils over every inch of exposed skin.

“Whoa,” she says, almost taking her hand off before stopping herself. “Do I have to keep my hand on?”

He nods.

She grimaces. “Of course…"

But she does, and Crowley doesn’t waste a moment, inspecting first the marks on his head, then his hands. Everything else is covered, but it’s no matter—the problem is systemic, the same pattern repeated throughout all the spellwork. He nudges her hand when he returns to her side, and she doesn’t hesitate in wiping her palm on the thigh of her jeans.

He tells himself it’s because of the filth his otherwise delightful body has acquired in its ignominious travels.

Returning to the table, he goes to a fresh corner of dust, then begins spelling out a powerful spell for unbinding—something he likely picked up from his mother, once upon a time. Eileen studies the Gaelic words—mixing magic systems isn’t typically done, but Gaelic has always felt more natural to him for spellwork, and so he finds it fitting, given the intent and circumstances.

“I know this spell,” she interrupts him mid-way through the second line. He breathes a sigh. The spell is nine lines long and this has already gone on an absurdly long time. “My Gaelic is a little rusty, but I remember.”

If he weren’t a demon and if he didn’t have it on good authority—that is, his own—that God is a colossal bastard, he might have sent up thanks that of all the hunters in all the world, Eileen Leahy is the one who crossed his path.

Without waiting for further instructions, Eileen returns to his body, but frowns when she checks her pockets.

“Something to write with? Marker or something?” she asks, coming up with only a lighter, a burner phone, and what looks like a receipt.

He looks around the room, but it’s fairly bare besides broken furniture, dirt, twigs, and dried leaves. There is, however, a handy stick of wood that might just do the trick. He nudges it with his nose, and Eileen latches on immediately to his plan.

Using the lighter, she burns the tip of the stick. Returning to his body, she then draws three sigils with the ashes from the stick: one on each palm and one on his forehead. It’s a step he’d been willing to skip for the sake of efficiency and time, but it will certainly make the spell stronger.

The Gaelic words are a little rough on her tongue, but are certainly passable. The red sigils appear again for a second before flaring golden and disappearing all together.

At last.

He smokes out of the rat and back into his body. It takes him a second, lying there on the floor, to settle back in, to let his twisted soul seep into every pore and tendon. Picking himself up off the ground at last, he dusts himself off as best he can, though the suit is irrevocably ruined, thanks to Lucifer’s stab wound.

“Well, that’s better,” he says, crinking his neck. From the corner of his eye, he sees the dazed rat do the same before scurrying away into some dark recess of this place. “I suppose this makes us even, Ms. Leahy.”

She crosses her arms. “Perhaps. If demons want you dead, they have no use for me. And once they find out you’re not dead…"

“It is a pickle, yes,” he admits, entirely unconcerned. “Lucky for me, and you, being in a pickle is just another Tuesday for me.”

The wheels turn in the hunter’s head for a moment before she puts it all together. “You’re going to replicate yourself. Like however you did me.”

“Points for the lady.” He winks at her. She rolls her eyes. “It’s not a perfect solution,” he allows before walking over to a particularly cluttered corner and sifting through the detritus to find some suitable twigs. He turns to face her. “But it should hold long enough to fool the dimwits who’ve followed his Unholiness. And I heard through the grapevine your body double fooled even Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.”   

Eileen watches as he quickly bends and bundles the twigs in a loose humanoid shape using threads from his suit. Not his most artistic work, granted—he’s more of a Jackson Pollock who really enjoys red, to be honest—but it’s serviceable.  

“How did you get this to fool the Hellhound?” she asks.

Crowley purses his lips, working a particularly stubborn twig into place.

“Brutus is a good boy,” he says at last, spinning the four-inch-tall twig-man between his fingers, inspecting his work. “But, he passed his prime sometime around when Queen Vicky was on her last legs. I couldn’t put him down—I’m a demon, not a monster. Raised him from a pup. Was my first Hellhound—well, the first I raised on my own.”

Eileen raises an eyebrow. “Hellhound puppies?”

“Adorable little murder beasts. Brutus has been helping the kennel master train them.”

“Hell has a kennel master?”

“Of course,” he scoffs. “In any case, those jumped-up twats at the Men of Letters want a Hellhound, I give them a Hellhound. I merely neglected to mention Brutus’ limitations. And it gave the ol’ boy one last go. Made him feel special. Knife?”

Hesitantly, she draws the weapon and hands it over. “I suppose if you wanted to kill me, you would have by now.”

“Naturally.” He slices into his palm and lets the blood drip over the 'heart' of the twig-man. “Besides, after all we’ve been through, it would hardly be any fun like this—if I had any inclination to do so.”

“Bet you say that to all the girls,” she adds dryly.

“Boys and otherwise identifying persons, too. I’m all about equal opportunities.”

Ignoring that, Eileen studies the twig-man. “I still don't get how this works. I thought you needed a whole heart for this spell.” She taps her own heart. "I mean, I'm glad you didn't need mine, but..

Crowley shrugs and puts the twig-man on the floor. “For a Stepford clone? Yes, a whole heart. For a passable decoy? Blood will suffice.”

In a moment, after some quick chanting and a bright glow of purple light, the twig-man transforms into Crowley’s double—dirt, ripped suit, and all. He really is quite good, if he does say so himself.

Straightening up from inspecting his work, he looks back at Eileen. With a touch, he transports both of them to a field somewhere southeast of Inverness. To her credit as a hunter, she barely looks fazed by the development.

“Well, Eileen, I do believe this is the end of our little arrangement. For now.”

Eileen bites the inside of her cheek, glancing around the wide landscape. She hugs her arms close to her body. “Everyone thinks I’m dead.”

“Rarely a bad position to be in, love. The element of surprise is always a delight. And I’m sure you know the value of being underestimated.”

She gives him a bitter half-smile and nod. “Why me, Crowley? You could have just given them the Hellhound, called it a day.”

“And face the wrath of the Winchesters?” He shakes his head. “As moronic as those boys may be, they do know how to carry a grudge. I’d rather not repeat the experience.”

She nods in agreement. “You know, you’re not bad. For a demon.”

“Not _bad_? You wound me, Ms. Leahy. That’s my whole raison d’être.”

“Maybe you should do something you’re better at, then.”

He glares at her, but without any real heat, especially considering the smile playing at the corners of her lips.

“Consider yourself lucky I’m in a charitable mood after your assistance today,” he says. He turns away to leave.

“You mean, after I saved your ass,” she mutters.

Out of sight from her, he smirks. No wonder the Moose likes her.

(So he’s had eyes on all of them for years. Sue him. It’s what he does.)

He spins back on his heel to face her and grins.

“Give my love to the boys when you see them next. Well, Dean, at least. I’m sure you can take care of Sam on your own.”

Her mouth drops open, but he snaps his fingers and whisks himself away.

He has an archangel to kill. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, Thayer, for all your help!
> 
> Also - I don't speak ASL, nor am I deaf/hard of hearing, so if there's any error/something I should have done differently, please let me know!!
> 
> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos appreciated!
> 
> Check out my other works (sorted by series for easier navigation):  
> [Grey's works](http://archiveofourown.org/users/grey2510/series)  
> Come visit me on Tumblr! @[grey2510](https://grey2510.tumblr.com/)


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